Beginner Guide To Building A Personal Website
Gone are the days when websites were a domain reserved mainly for big corporations. Today, anyone can have a website for a small business or for a personal project. If your reason for not having a website is because you don’t even have a clue of where to start, we have put together this beginner guide just for you.
photo/ Gerd Altmann via pixabay
Here are the steps to take:
Choose a Content Management Systems (CMS) Platform
The first thing to do is to decide on the CMS platform that your personal website is going to be built on. There are many CMS platform to choose from, some of which are easy to use. And according to the experts, WordPress carries the day not just because it’s newbie-friendly, but because it’s also mobile-friendly (responsive), powerful, and best of all – free. It’s also the most popular CMS platform, followed by Drupal and Joomla.
Come Up with a Domain Name
A domain name is basically your personal website’s online address. Good news is that WordPress gives you a free domain name, which is generally a sub-domain. While this makes your work easier, it’s however not a very good thing. Having an actual domain name looks more impressive and legitimate than having a sub-domain.
When creating a domain name, you can use your firstname+middlename.com as your domain name. Alternatively, you can think of the main keyword terms or phrases that best describe your personal website. While at it, you need to ensure that your domain name:
- Is short and easy to remember
- Is catchy so it can stick to people’s heads
- Is unique so as not to be easily confused with another site
- Doesn’t infringe on anyone’s copyright
- Doesn’t include numbers or hyphens that could make giving it out verbally difficult.
It’s also advisable for you to go for .com, .org, or .net available domains. These are considered the most valuable for brands and those targeting a global audience. You can also consider top level local domains such as .co.uk, .co.es, .co.ke, etc.
Choose a Web Hosting Service
The next thing is to decide how your personal website will be hosted. While WordPress provides free hosting, you might want to consider a paid hosting plan, especially if you want fast, high-quality and reliable web hosting. BlueHost is one of the most popular web hosting services. Note that you can get a domain name and web hosting from the same place, just about the same time.
Set Up your Personal Website
The last step is to get your website to function. If you choose WordPress, you have to choose between two options – manual installation or 1-click installation. The latter gets your website up and running in no time and most web hosts will have it integrated as a standard within their dashboard.
As for the manual installation, it gives you the option to install all the features that you want and omit those you don’t want. You have to choose a theme, install plugins, and publish posts and pages, etc.
Conclusion
For a novice, web design can be awfully frustrating or exceptionally fun. To find yourself in more of the latter than the former, you need to arm yourself with the right tools. There are two paths to choose between. You can hire a professional web developer, that’s if you have a few hundreds of dollars to spend. Two, you can build your personal website, that’s if you are a confident do-it-yourself kind-of-a-person. Whichever path you decide to take, just ensure that the end result is a beautiful and professional website that best reflects your personality.
Author: Lisa McNair
